It comes after months of hearings in the Alice Springs Local Court during an inquest into the Warlpiri-Luritja man’s death, and a Supreme Court trial in which Mr Rolfe was acquitted on all charges.

It will be his third stint in the witness box, after giving evidence in his own defence at the trial and following his refusal to answer questions before Coroner Elisabeth Armitage in November 2022.

The months of legal wrangling that followed ultimately resulted in Ms Armitage’s decision compelling him to testify being affirmed, before she also knocked back a bid for her recusal.

But way back in September 2022, the Coroner opened proceedings with a question: “Do I know the story of Kumanjayi Walker, and Constable Zachary Rolfe? Do you?”

Who was Kumanjayi Walker?

Kumanjayi Walker was 19 when he died in Yuendumu in November 2019.

By the time his cousin Samara Fernandez-Brown came to give evidence at the inquest almost three years later, much had been written about his untimely death and its lead-up, but little was known about the man himself.

Ms Fernandez-Brown told the court she remembered spending time with Mr Walker, who was only a few years her junior, when they both spent time in Adelaide as children.

“We’d spend some time just at each other’s houses, watching TV and going to the park and just doing regular things that kids did at that age,” she said.

“Similar to what people describe him as an adult, he was quite quiet in his sort of composure, but was very enjoyable to be around, funny and he always had quite a calm presence.”

It was only as he got older that Mr Walker started to get in trouble with the police, with Ms Fernandez-Brown later telling the NT News his family continued to mourn for a young man who was “loved so deeply by his community” and loved them deeply in return.

“I think as a society it’s so easy to hold yourself at arms length from somebody because you don’t want that to be your reality,” she says.

“But I think it’s really important to sit in our shoes and to think about how deeply he is missed and how much of an impact he’s had on our community, and to really humanise him, and to remember that this was a 19-year-old man, whose life was taken away from him.”

Who is Zach Rolfe?

Zach Rolfe has given a number of “exclusive” interviews since the shooting, the first coming just weeks later when he sat down with The Australian’s Kristen Shorten in 2019.

He told the newspaper he was born and raised in Canberra by his car dealer father Richard and mother Debbie, a lawyer.

Mr Rolfe said he had arrived in the Territory for the first time after taking up the role with NT Police in 2016 and “wanted to dive into the deep end and learn my craft (in Alice Springs)”.

“The move was definitely eye-opening,” he told The Australian.

“To be honest, for the first few weeks in Alice I would have felt more comfortable in Kabul, it was a completely different world to Canberra where I’d grown up.”

Since then, Mr Rolfe has declined to answer all but a handful of questions at the inquest before releasing an open letter in his defence, that ultimately got him sacked from the force last year.

In the letter, he dismissed racist text messages he sent to NT Police colleagues — in which he referred to Aboriginal people as “c**ns” and “neanderthals” — as “playground language”.

Mr Rolfe said he was “a good cop” and apologised for using “rude and racist terms”, but argued they “meant nothing” because “words only mean what the person using them or hearing them puts a value on them”.

“If I were to insult you in a language you didn’t understand, it would be meaningless to you; you don’t get to choose what meaning someone else puts on the words they use,” he wrote.

“Despite my language, and my potential to be rude, I have risked my life for strangers multiple times; if anyone was in danger, I would put myself between them and that danger to protect them.”

What happened inside House 511 in Yuendumu on November 9, 2019?

Much of what took place on that day in 2019 is not in dispute.

Zach Rolfe had been deployed to Yuendumu along with the rest of his four-man Immediate Response Team unit to, among other things, arrest Mr Walker on an outstanding warrant.

Various conflicting accounts of the lead up to the shooting have been heard, first at the criminal trial and again during the months’ long Coronial inquest.

But police body-worn video footage, tendered in both proceedings, shows Mr Rolfe and Constable Adam Eberl approach Mr Walker inside the house where he gives the officers the false name of Vernon Dixon.

Mr Rolfe is then seen holding a photo up next to Mr Walker’s face, confirming his identity and the pair attempts to place him under arrest.

A struggle then ensues and the three men — Mr Walker now armed with a small pair of scissors — fall to the ground where ultimately Mr Rolfe shoots him three times with his service glock.

Investigators accepted the first two shots were justified and it was only the third, coming just 2.6 seconds later, that led to him being charged with Mr Walker’s murder.

Why was Zach Rolfe acquitted?

Mr Rolfe went on to take the stand in his own defence in the Supreme Court in March 2022, where he told jurors Mr Walker had reached for his handgun as the trio struggled.

He said almost immediately, the 19-year-old had started resisting, before he struck him twice “on top of the head in a hammer fist motion”.

“I thought this was strange because he wasn’t using his knuckles so at that point I looked at his hand and that was the first time I ID’d that he had a metal blade,” he said.

“Instinctively, at that time, I put my hand on my Glock, at which point I realised that his left hand was already on my glock.”

Mr Rolfe said he had immediately feared for his life upon seeing the blade as well as for his partner’s life when he saw Mr Walker “stabbing Eberl in the chest and neck area” and was at all times acting in accordance with his training and in self-defence.

Ultimately, the jury was not satisfied that prosecutors had proven otherwise.

“The Crown produced 40 witnesses to support the narrative that Rolfe, a police officer, is guilty of murder – we say, they have not come close,” defence barrister David Edwardson KC told them at the time.

“In fact, with the exception of Senior Sergeant (Andrew) Barram, each police witness only confirmed the truth of the matter – what Zachary Rolfe did was, not only what he was trained to do, but his response by firing all three shots was reasonable and proportionate in the circumstances.”

How has Kumanjayi Walker’s family reacted to the evidence at the inquest?

When Coroner Elisabeth Armitage visited Yuendumu in November 2022, senior Warlpiri Elder Ned Jampijinpa Hargraves told the media traditional payback for a homicide involved an organised cultural ceremony.

He said the perpetrator would have the chance to have his say and the victim’s family would then decide on a punishment based on the seriousness of the crime, including spearing to both legs for the most serious offences.

“Deep in our hearts, deep in our minds, deep in the community, we want to see justice — we have not seen the blood of Zach Rolfe,” he said.

“That tells us that is not the way it should have been, it tells us we have been disrespected, we as a community stand and fight for justice — parumpurru — it’s the end of the line.”

Other community members have remained more measured while still expressing their anger and frustration, with Mr Walker’s cousin telling the NT News in 2022 trust in police would not be restored until Mr Rolfe was removed from his post.

Samara Fernandez-Brown said the family were “disgusted” by his “cowardice” in invoking a legal privilege against incriminating himself in internal disciplinary proceedings to avoid testifying at the inquest.

“The least he can do is answer questions around why he behaved in that way, why he sent those text messages, and everything else,” she said.

What happens next?

After multiple unsuccessful challenges to the coronial proceedings, there now only remains two witnesses yet to testify, their legal options now apparently exhausted.

Sergeant Lee Bauwens is due to front two days of questioning from counsel assisting the Coroner Peggy Dwyer SC and a phalanx of other lawyers for Mr Walker’s family and others from Thursday.

Then on Monday, a final week of evidentiary hearings will commence, with the only man still alive who knows exactly what happened that day set to take the stand — former NT Police constable Zachary Brian Rolfe.